Improving critical Thinking Skills among Iranian Agricultural Students: Applying Social Cognitive and Autopoietic Systems Theories

Achieving the goals of sustainable agriculture significantly depends on the critical thinking skills of the actors in this area. Accordingly, agricultural technical and vocational schools strive to develop the critical thinking skills of future farmers who are currently studying in these schools. Achieving this is not possible without a proper understanding of the critical thinking skills of agricultural students and development of a comprehensive model to strengthen them. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop a model for strengthening the critical thinking skills of agricultural students in the technical and vocational schools in Iran by using social cognitive and autopoietic systems theories (N = 4939). Out of the population of the interest, 282 students were selected as a statistical sample using a multi-stage sampling method. The data collection tool was a questionnaire, which its validity confirmed using the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) and the Average Shared Variance (ASV) indices. Besides, the reliability of the instrument was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha coefficients and composite reliability (CR). Findings showed that the students’ critical thinking skills are divers according to their schools type. Moreover, students’ observational experiences had the greatest direct effect on their critical thinking skills (t = 4.94, β = 0.30) which followed by perceived self-efficacy (t = 3.61, β = 0.27), social confirmation (t = 2.86, β = 0.17), and immediate individual experiences (t = 2.68, β = 0.14), respectively. These factors could account for 53 % of the variance of students' critical thinking skills.